“The actual Chinese expression “Hearing something a hundred times isn’t better than seeing it once” (百闻不如一见, p bǎi wén bù rú yī jiàn) is sometimes introduced as an equivalent, as Watts‘s “One showing is worth a hundred sayings”.[6] This was published as early as 1966 discussing persuasion and selling in a book on engineering design.[7]”

Rockstor’s 5 git repositories visualised in just over 1.5 minutes.

The essence of Gource’s use, at least on a linux desktop, is to initially build from the code and then point the resulting binary at a copy of one’s repository. The wrinkle here is that Rockstor, akin to many projects, consists of multiple repositories:

“Sometimes it may be interesting to show the history of multiple projects in the same Gource animation.”

Thanks people.

This mini HowTo is essentially a re-telling of that page as applied to Rockstor’s 5 repositories. The hope is that this ‘telling’ might aid other multi-repo projects and save us all some time; at least on mass.

Building Gource

As of 8th September 2017 v0.47 was released which is the version I used here. Be sure to visit their releases page to check on availability of any newer releases. As always it’s best to resource the original text on install matters: please favour the projects own INSTALL doc over what I state here. But by way of completeness I’ll indicate how it worked for me:

There’s also a nice selection of mouse interactions such as jumping to any time point; although this does reset the graph. While paused one can inspect the details of individual files and users, and dragging with the left mouse button manually controls the camera. Centre button toggles tracking / entire tree view.

Note that as with the mouse ‘time jumps’ in the interactive mode covered earlier, using the “–start-date” option, as we have just done, results in no previous activity being displayed. That is, only files changed after the given date, and their respective repositories, will appear in the resulting Gource graph.

Rockstor 3.8-1 update is now available. Support has been added for a much anticipated and important feature to automatically import BTRFS data(Pools, Shares and Snapshots) on drives from a different Rockstor machine or a previous install. More functional tests have been added and KVM support is enhanced by fixing the issue with disk scan and Virtio.

This is the list of changes in this release:

1. Added support to Auto import BTRFS data from previous install or a different Rockstor system. Issue #534

I’ve built several Rockstor NAS servers since I’ve been developing Rockstor. Rockstor 3 was released in early september of this year and we are glad to see more users every day since. All the while, my Rockstor NAS boxes on old dell and hp boxes with different amounts of accumulated dust are chugging along.

It’s time to build something new primarily to give our super-home and small business users a reference when building their own Rockstor NAS box. After researching various motherboard and cpu options, I’ve decided to keep things simple. The goal is not to build the cheapest system, but a decent one with parts that have credibility in the DIY NAS community. So I based my build on this technutz post which also gives us the opportunity to compare Rockstor with FreeNAS, the OS choice in that article.

Note about RAM: The motherboard takes 1333Mz DDR3 RAM, so make sure you get the right speed. It failed to recognize a faster(1600 MT/s) SO-DIMM. With the correct RAM, it took about 30 minutes to assemble the box and it was ready for the Rockstor install.

BIOS notes: I went over every screen in the BIOS and changed a couple of settings. The important one is to enable AHCI mode in SATA configuration which lets you hotswap drives on the running system.

Rockstor requires one full disk drive for the operating system. So the choice is either to use one of the SATA drives or boot from a USB stick. There are mixed opinions about running Linux from USB. There two clear disadvantages: (1) OS runs slowly from USB compared to SATA (2) USB sticks incrementally deteriorate or suddenly crash one day. I’d like to experiment and find out how it works and in the worst case scenario, I’ll just reinstall Rockstor on a new USB stick. My actual data on the SATA drives will still be untouched.

I plugged the network cable, power chord, keyboard, mouse, external cdrom and started Rockstor install. It was a bit slow installing to the USB, but no other problems were encountered.

Note about USB bootup: I noticed that sometimes, upon reboot the system doesn’t recognize the usb stick. Just remove it, plug it back in and reboot. This worked every time I saw this problem. Also, reboots are rare and this did not happen on every reboot. so, small pain for extra hard drive space.

Rockstor has been running great on this little box. It’s the smallest and quietest 8TB Rockstor NAS box I know. As part of Rockstor testing, I am sure to stress test this box, gather performance metrics etc.. I’ll share my findings in future posts. Please submit your comments and feel free to email us: support@rockstor.com